The Billion Dollar Balcony. ASIO’s sovereignty failure

“Bondi deserves better… Australia deserves better.” david tyler Examines ASIO’s security failure in Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack.

While none of this will ease the pain, ease the trauma of those recovering in hospital or console the families grieving the loss of loved ones in Bondi, we owe them, and ourselves, an explanation.

Not platitudes, not another dreary press conference, but an honest reckoning about how two men, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, were able to amass their arsenal and carry out Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack undetected by the billion-dollar intelligence agency said to keep us safe.

Repeat of failure

What emerges from the wreckage of Bondi? Hanukkah massacre It’s a terrifying familiarity. The faces and headlines change, but the plot remains the same: “Perpetrators known to the authorities,” a catalog of missed warnings, and a security bureaucracy that responds not with accountability but with expansion.

ASIOs The budget currently exceeds $700 million annually; This figure has increased well above inflation since 2011, when financing was approximately $400 million. The agency employs more than 2,000 staff at its Canberra headquarters in the Ben Chifley building and has powers that reach deep into the private lives of Australians.

Again Bernard Keane analysis Krikey ($) makes devastatingly clear that none of this has prevented the suburban arsenal from flourishing in full view.

Naveed Akram, 24, was investigated by ASIO in 2019 for his close ties to an organisation. ISIS cell in Sydney, including his links to Isaac Al Matari, who describes himself as the head of the Islamic State in Australia. The investigation lasted six months before Akram was cleared on the grounds that he “showed no indication of any ongoing threat”.

Meanwhile, his father Sajid had a valid statement. NSW firearms license – a privilege granted not only to citizens but also to permanent residents, and he had legally acquired six long guns. The weapons were located at the family home in Bonnyrigg, a western suburb of Sydney; Here it seems that the mass murder plan was made without being detected.

Intelligence is invalid

What is the point of intelligence that can detect environmental protesters? but can’t connect a weapons cache to a known extremist link? What kind of caution misleads the understanding of data accumulation?

For years, ASIO has been given the tools, access and legal authority to conduct more granular surveillance of Australians. Every failure becomes a justification for more power; Every failure is another claim for extraordinary funding.

ASIO, Australia in August 2024 terrorist threat level It moved from “possible” to “likely”, citing increasing risks related to the Gaza conflict. But when the attack took place at a highly publicized Hanukkah celebration attended by nearly a thousand people, the surveillance state watched from elsewhere.

What was sold as “learning lessons” became ritualized immunity. Failure no longer costs anything. The system was designed not to prevent disaster, but to survive and demand more funds later.

Mossad and the question of sovereignty

And then came the confession that made this claim clear. Following the massacre, Israeli intelligence confirmed it was assisting Australian officials in the investigation.

The claim, variations of which appeared on various news services, was this: Mossad He had warned Canberra of threats to Australian Jews ahead of the attack, probably as early as a month earlier, when he had warned Australian intelligence that an Iran-backed “terror infrastructure” was planning attacks on Jewish targets.

Whether one accepts the framing or not, the symbolism is clear. When another country’s intelligence officers are called in to help “clean up” a homeland security disaster, the confession is clear: Our billion-dollar intelligence chiefs can’t clean up their own mess. This is not intelligence cooperation between equals. This is dependency masquerading as partnership.

Rhetoric of sovereignty

Just months ago ASIO Director General Mike Burgess He made his opening speech at the Lowy Institute, speaking in high tones about “protecting Australian sovereignty” and “defending Australia’s interests”. He told vivid stories of ASIO’s offshore operations, confronting foreign agents in third countries and sending stern warnings to rival intelligence services. It was a theater prepared to reflect power and independence.

But when disaster struck, these words turned to irony.

If sovereignty means the capacity to protect one’s own citizens from mass murder on one’s own soil without resorting to the intelligence apparatus of a foreign power, then Burgess’s Lowy lecture sounded like just that: maternal pronouncements nailed to the clothesline of national security, fluttering in the breeze of self-righteousness.

The contradiction gets deeper. ASIO’s 2025 Lowy Conference talked about “protecting sovereignty” and “defending democracy”, the grand abstractions used to justify expanded powers and budgets. But sovereignty is not an abstraction.

It is the measurable capacity of a state to secure its territory, protect its people, and act independently of foreign patrons. In this respect, Bondi represents a comprehensive failure.

The neoliberal takeover of national security

There is a deeper illness here and it needs to be diagnosed. Like so much of Canberra’s official life, Australia’s intelligence apparatus has been compromised. neoliberal logic; not textbook economics of privatization and deregulation, but the cultural logic of perpetual growth, metrics-driven performance, and the substitution of true competence for corporate self-preservation.

This is the phase of neoliberalism that sees sovereignty as a subject of bargaining.

As a brand, alliances and accountability are seen as a threat to be managed rather than a principle to be defended. ASIO functions as a franchise operator rather than a guardian of independence. Five Eyes A network model that privileges intelligence-sharing arrangements with Washington, London and now Tel Aviv over the low-key exercise of connecting the dots in suburban Sydney.

The institution measures success not by the security it provides, but by the scale of the next grant. He builds his claim to expanded power through the disasters he cannot prevent. Budget presentations mention “evolving threats” and “unprecedented challenges”; the same rhetoric is used year after year and is free from fraud. This is not protection; It is the performance guaranteed by the fiction that more surveillance equals more security.

In this model, sovereignty becomes a marketing slogan rather than a strategic commitment. Operational questions such as who we spy on, who we trust, what risks we accept are resolved not in Canberra but through the inherited architecture of Cold War alliance structures.

Australian intelligence does not serve Australian sovereignty; It operates as a secondary node in an Anglosphere network whose strategic priorities are written elsewhere.

Neoliberal infection manifests itself in familiar pathologies: bloat devoid of capacity, data devoid of insight, secrecy replacing competence. ASIO has become bigger, louder and more publicly visible under the leadership of Mike Burgess, but its core function of preventing mass casualty attacks on Australian soil has not noticeably improved.

What is developed is the ability to manage narratives.

Deflect scrutiny and secure bipartisan support for budget increases regardless of performance.

This is the logic behind the emergence of a multi-billion dollar agency that can track foreign intelligence officers across continents but fails to realize that a man whose ISIS connections are being investigated lives in a house full of six rifles. This is a logic that privileges the theatrical over the practical, the ostentatious foreign operation over the mundane business of domestic vigilantism.

Whose sovereignty exactly?

Meanwhile, Australia’s national security doctrine still orbits Washington and London. Strategic questions such as who do we spy on, who do we arm, who do we trust are resolved long before the dossier notes reach Canberra. Viewed from this perspective, ASIO’s ritual accusations of “foreign interference” become farce.

How can an organization whose operational DNA is written in the language of the Five Eyes alliance, whose threat assessments reflect those of its Anglosphere partners, and whose protocols conform to intelligence hierarchies established in another hemisphere, defend sovereignty?

The contradiction becomes clear in Bondi.

It is easy to talk about independence in think tanks and Senate hearings; It becomes even more difficult for Israeli intelligence to step in to assist with an investigation that ASIO should have initiated earlier.

This is not sovereignty. This is addiction disguised as challenge; The exercise of autonomy by an institution that is structurally unable to provide autonomy.

We owe a debt to the victims

Those who mourn, those who heal, those whose lives are shattered deserve more than another sealed inquest and another clenched-jawed promise to “do better.”

They deserve transparency.

They deserve to know how a billion-dollar agency with unprecedented powers and legal carte blanche missed the signals yet again.

They deserve to know who allowed foreign intelligence to quietly become involved in Australia’s internal security affairs and under what circumstances. They deserve to know why a man previously investigated for terrorist ties was able to live in a house full of legally acquired guns without triggering a single alarm.

So are we all. If sovereignty has any meaning; If it is more than a flag used to hide corporate shame, then accountability must be its core.

Until ASIO explains what it does with our money, our laws and our trust, until it shows that Australian lives matter more than budget submissions and alliance protocols, national sovereignty will remain a performance, not a principle.

The guard on the cast iron balcony

Hal Porter Lookout on the Cast-Iron Balcony He gave Australian literature one of its enduring archetypes: an elevated and detached observer, watching the life of the nation emerging below with an objectivity bordering on contempt.

This is a fitting image for our intelligence agency, a billion-dollar watchdog sitting above the conflict, cataloging threats, compiling dossiers, monitoring everything; winding everyone up regularly; but when it comes to protecting anyone he seems distant or non-existent.

Bondi showed us once again what happens when a nation confuses surveillance with security, loyalty with competence. The observer on the balcony can see everything but understand nothing. Data floods, threat assessments pile up, and public statements reassure us that we’re all fine. And while the observer watches, Australians bleed out in the street below.

Until we accept this failure not as an aberration but as the predictable consequence of a system that aims to expand rather than protect; Sovereignty will remain what it is: a word we invoke when appropriate and abandon when tested.

Bondi wants better. The families of the dead deserve better. Australia deserves better.

Author David Tyler writes as Urban Wronski. It might be his job found here On Substack.

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